Jousting at the windmills of hypocrisy, scammers, and other stuff that irritates me.

Friday, March 18, 2005

More booms....

FunnyAs a kid growing up, I was fascinated with things that went boom. I think you can pretty much say that about every red-blooded American boy, but this is my story. If I could get ladyfingers (those little tiny fire crackers that you could light in your hand and have them go off) that was cool...but BlackCats were better...and Cherry Bombs were the best (thanks for the email Fish!). We used to drop them into ponds to see what would happen....usually there was a fish or two in the area that would come floating to the top because it was stunned.

But of course, as with anything, you always had to escalate it. It was boring to just do the same thing. So we'd catch a frog, and duct-tape a cherry bomb to it. And set it free...ok, free for a few seconds anyway. One of the coolest things (and one of the things I got my ass beat for the most) was when I dropped a cherry bomb into a horse tank. Now, for those of you who don't know what a horse tank is, it's basically this hundred or so gallon tank of water for watering livestock. Cherry bomb fuses were waterproof (which I always thought was cool) so we'd drop them in the pond without fear of them going out. One day I had been out to the pond with my buddy David, and we blew all kinds of things up there, and we were back at his house. They had horses there, and we had one cherry bomb left. Somehow we put it in a pocket and forgot about it. So, David gets the bright idea to put it in the horse tank and spook the horses, so I say "hey, they're YOUR horses, I don't much care", so we wander over, light it, and drop it in the tank. There was only one horse even nearby the tank, but we figured that was good enough, and besides I had to head home soon.The next couple seconds, we stood there like Beavis & Butthead laughing, saying how cool it was going to be with the water spout going up in the air, and the horse running around like a maniac....then it happened.

The tank blew up. No, not the water spout in the air we expected, the entire tank just went BOOM. and all the water went everywhere. Of course the plumbing that his dad had rigged to the tank was squirting water everywhere, the horse is running around like a damn maniac, kicking at everything, the other horses that were a good 200 yards away were spooked, and we're looking at each other like "Dude, I can't believe you let me do that".

I quick ran to the pipe that fed the tank to try to turn it off, but the spooked 1500 pound Appaloosa standing there huffing and kicking made me decide that it probably wasn't such a good idea. David lured the horse around to the other side of the fence and I crawled under to get to the pipe to turn it off. Unfortunately, the concussive effect of the cherry bomb that was amplified by the water, did some damage to the plumbing, because I couldn't turn the handle at all. And the horse was coming back...so I climbed back under the fence, and proceded to get a pretty good feeling of what it's like to sit in an electric chair. See, they had an electric fence around this horse area, and when you stuck your butt up too high in the air when you were climbing under it, the fence liked to remind you that it was there. Well, being that I was soaking wet, laying in two inches of water, I got a good lively charge. David laughed so hard he damn near pissed himself while I had a seizure. Ok, not a full-on seizure, just a "goddamn get this fence off me cuz I feel like I'm gonna die" seizure.

When I got home, I immediately threw my clothes into the washing machine, started a load of laundry, and took a shower. Trying to destroy whatever evidence I could. Never really considering what's going to happen when David's dad calls my dad. Heck, I coulda saved myself some domestic work if I woulda thought about that. So, I'm sitting at dinner, thinking "wow, I'm gonna get away with this", and the phone rings. And apparently all the color drained from my face. At least, that's what my mom tells me. I don't have much recall of what happened for pretty much the rest of the evening, but I can say that my parents were not happy with my behavior. And that's the understatement of the year.